1/48 Italeri IAF F-16C Barak WIP

Sure would! I'm thrashing thru a wheels-up build of the Italeri F-16 AM/ADF, and it'll be inspirational to see what you do with the Barak, knowing your skill level. Please post away!

Mike

Oh yes!   I want to see what you do with that Israeli camo scheme after what you did with the Strike Eagle.

BTW, your building skills are pretty sharp too!

Can't wait! I have not seen this kit before, or at least I don't remember if I have, I thought they did it in 72 scale.

Alrighty!  Thanks for the kind words guys!  With nice comments like that I think I'll begin posting.

I've got some AM stuff for this kit.  Right now I've got:

• Aires F-16C Barak cockpit
• Royal Resin weighted wheels
• Brassin AIM-120Bs

There are a few other things I may get like the metal pitot tube and AOA sensors and some AM decals.  I will probably add some hydraulic lines to the landing gear as well.

Here's the Aires cockpit.  Its very nicely detailed but there is much surgery needed to make it fit into the kit fuselage parts:

I didn't take a before pic but here you can see where I sanded out the details on the inside of the upper fuselage part.  I also cut out some of the plastic behind where the seat will be.  I also removed some of the plastic to widen the space where the IP coaming will fit.  I just bought a Dremel 3000 and it worked great sanding out the fuselage part:

On thing that is really nice is that the ejection seat slides down into those guide rails and the fit is spot on.  I have no idea how they mold these!

One thing I try to do when I build is to get much of the smaller details out of the way at the beginning.  Many of you saw on the F-15E build that I had the weapons, fuel tanks and wheels assembled and painted at the beginning.  I'm doing that here with this build, too.

Here are the fuel tanks assembled and primed:

I can tell you already that this kit is not nearly as nice as the Tamiya kit...not even close!

I stumbled onto your technique of getting the small stuff out early on my current GB project. The hardest part of any model for me is the final details.  So building them first takes most of that pain out of the mix.

Here's the cockpit painted up.  Its missing a few resin and PE parts that will be attached later.  The base grey color was airbrushed on but all of the detail painting was hand brushed on.  I still need to wash the tub and the side panels:

In the pic below the flash really highlights the dry brushing.  It looks much better to the naked eye:

After dry fitting the tub into the fuselage half I realized that I needed to sand the bottom of the tub down quite a bit.  I had to sand it down to the point where I began sanding into the bottom of the tub.  This is OK since the ejection seat covers it up.  In the pic below you can see the effect the sanding had:

Here's the ejection seat.  Its 95% complete.  All that is missing are some PE details that I will put on at the very end or else I'll break them off.  This has been washed and its the same wash I'll be giving to the tub:

Here's the tub with a wash applied.  Its really visible in the olive drab floor part and on the sidewalls:

That cockpit tub paint work looks fantastic.   Aires does like to use a lot of resin in the sidewalls and tub structure.

That tub might be heavy enough that you might not need any additional weight up front to keep it from tail-sitting.

Thanks!

Dre

That tub might be heavy enough that you might not need any additional weight up front to keep it from tail-sitting.

That ought to do it.  

 I'm thinking that a nosecone full of bird shot might make for some false returns on the tracking radar.....

Ha!  Yeah, you'd think you'd be flying into a mountain!

This kit is very similar to the Tamiya kit in the way that the parts are broken down...but the fit of the parts and the crispness of the parts is not even close to the Tamiya kit.  In fact, I think this is a reboxing of the Kinetic kit which is newer than the Tamiya kit!

Here's the intake.  I've built two Tamiya F-16s before and both times I assembled the intakes completely before installing them into the lower fuselage part.  Doing this allows you to make the unit seamless.  Otherwise the instructions have you assemble the intake into a front half and a rear half and install them separately.  

These took alot of sanding before they were good enough.  Plus, they had really large ejector pin marks that had these sprue stalagmites sticking up out of them.  In the end, though, I think I did pretty good with them.

I used the "pour & dump" method of pouring white latex paint into the intake and then dumping it out and letting it dry.  Its a little grainy because I lightly sanded out a few blemishes in the paint:

Here's the compressor face.  Again, this part isn't nearly up to Tamiya standards.  I painted it Alclad II Steel and highlighted the raised detail with silver:

Yikes, that compressor face is pretty much featureless.

Would it be worth it to make a bunch of tiny triangles to shove in there as blades?

I've assembled the fuselage parts that wrap around the forward intake.  I hate to sound like a broken record but, again, the fit of the parts is surprisingly bad.

I've also painted and attached the intake lip.  Some people like to attach this part at the beginning and sand it seamlessly with the intake.  Then later on they will mask it and paint it the old fashioned way.  I think it easier to paint it and attach it later:

The top of the completed assembly leaves some fairly large steps.  One of these steps is the result of the lip piece not mating flush with the fuselage parts.  The other steps are just bad molding on the parts themselves.  I used Aves Apoxie Sculpt to fill in the depressed space:

After sanding you can see how much filler was needed to make the part seamless:

Dre

Yikes, that compressor face is pretty much featureless.

Would it be worth it to make a bunch of tiny triangles to shove in there as blades?

I can understand the irk, Fly.    That's one reason I love Trumpeter kits so much- they detail the hidden parts to a good degree.

The main reason I bought this kit was because it included the Barak parts and weapons.  I should have just bought the Tamiya kit and the AM resin parts for a few $$ more to build it up into a Barak.  Oh well, I'm in it for the long haul now.

Besides, isn't this what modeling is?  Taking a bad kit and trying to make it good?  This will sharpen some skills I haven't used in a while since I've been getting pampered by Tamiya and Hasegawa.

I have no doubt that this will be awesome when finished.   I'm looking forward to the paint work to see how you layer it up.

Thanks Dre!  The layering on this will be a bit different.  Since there will be 4 main colors I will be using some clear colors like Mr. Color Smoke to give more consistent shading across the different body colors.

Moving along...Here's a peek at the weapons.  The kit does include quite a few weapons, which is a plus, but some of the moldings are unusable.  The AGM-65 Mavericks are complete junk.

The IAF weapons are OK, though, and look as if they are an addition to the kit.  I'm wondering if these are the Skunk Works weapons that have been packaged with the kit?

The load out will be 2 AIM-120Bs, 2 Python 4s, 1 GBU-15 and 1 SPICE.  An of course I will have the 3 fuel tanks, a LANTIRN pod and maybe a SNIPER XR pod.  Here they are painted and gloss coated:

And here they are decaled and mostly finished:

I've scratch built the seeker heads on the Pythons, GBU-15 and the SPICE.

The 2 AIM-120Bs are the Brassin resin missiles.  I have the fins painted and ready I just haven't put them on yet.  That's the kind of tedious stuff I hate doing.

Those weapons look fantastic!

Are you going to weather this one as intensely as the Strike Eagle?

Dre

Those weapons look fantastic!

Are you going to weather this one as intensely as the Strike Eagle?

I'm not sure how much weathering ill do with this one.  I'm pretty sure there won't be 11 layers of paint simply because I'd have to do that for each color!  I will do some layering, though.  And I'll do some general post shading for sure.

Here are the Royal Resin weighted wheels with primer:

And with paint:

They still need to be washed.  I'll do that when I wash the gear and the bays so they are all consistent.

Here's the polished canopy.  After I sanded out the mold line I used my new Dremel 3000 and the Novus polishing compounds to get it crystal clear:

I've finished the intake sub-assembly and installed it into the lower fuselage part.  The fit of the intake assembly into the fuselage part was surprisingly good:

The fit of this part, on the other hand, was incredibly terrible.  It sat about .5 mm higher up than the surrounding plastic:

I ended up sanding down the two mating surfaces and tried to get it to sit more flush with the intake parts.  I also cut the part into 2 pieces so that I can assemble the landing gear seperately:

After some serious filing I was able to get the piece to sit reasonably flush with the intake parts.

The part doesn't sit in the "saddle' very tightly, though, and the spaces will need to be dealt with.  I will use Mr. Surfacer 500 to do this.

Here are the two upper fuselage parts glued together.  I had to do a bit of sanding to get the parts to but up flush against one another.  

I've also installed the two panel parts in the back upper part.  Tamiya does this as well.  I wish they wouldn't.

The gun Muzzle is installed, also.

If I send you my Tornado weapons will you build them for me lol? I always find weapons tedious, I have to say I sort of agree with Dre about the extra detail even though I contradicted him on my thread, the extra detail Trumpeter is brilliant, just means all of the kit is taken care of, Revell didn't even bother to scribe any detail to the fuselage sides on my Tornado! Too much is better than too little I think! Loving this build fly!

Thanks Dean!  I don't particularly enjoy making the weapons but since they draw so much attention to the eye I tend to put alot of extra effort into them.  Your Tornado is looking great.  I like what you did with the cockpit.  I'm thinking about maybe getting the new 1/48 Tornado that Revell is coming out with.

Here's the vertical Stab and rudder sub assembly.  The stab is 2 parts that do not fit flush with each other.  One part sits about .5 mm higher than the other.  So I had to bust out the file, again.  

The lower part that the stab attaches to has some parts that are unique to the Israeli F-16s.  These parts are included in the kit, of course, but they look like they were added as a separate sprue.  In fact, there are several sprues that look like they were added after this kit was produced to be able to build it up into an Israeli F-16.  This, I think, helps to explain why so many of the parts don't fit very well.

You can see in the pic above the parts join together and form a natural panel line.  But the line has a fairly large gap and I will need to use Mr. Surfacer 500 to fill it and still leave a panel line.

I also attempted to assemble the exhaust and burner can.  What a disaster these parts were.  The fit was so bad I decided to use a Shull24 resin exhaust instead.  These are so much nicer anyway!

Here's how one of them looks on a 1/48 Hasegawa F-2A: